The Screengrab : seth rogan

"Adventureland": Greg Mottola and Yo La Tengo, in Search of the Sound of 1987

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:45:00 GMT

Back in 1996, Greg Mottola wrote and directed an excellent, low-key indie comedy called The Daytrippers, starring Hope Davis, Liev Schrieber, Campbell Scott, Parker Posey, Stanley Tucci--basically, your all-star indie cast, circa 1996. It got great reviews and did just well enough commercially to consign Motttola to the ranks of directors working in TV, where he gained a toehold on what would become the Judd Apatow Comedy Juggernaut by directing several episodes of the short-lived, Apatow-created series Undeclared. In a roundabout way, this would lead to his getting to direct Superbad, the monster hit written by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, with Apatow on board as a producer. Next week sees the release of the third film he has directed and the second he has made from his own script, Adventureland, a coming-of-age comedy, set in 1987, about a fresh college graduate (played by Jesse Eisenberg) spending his summer working at a Pittsburgh amusement park and falling in love with a co-worker, played by Twilight's Kristen Stewart. Given the youthful characters, the noisy, hormonal atmosphere, and the presence in the cast of such SNL stalwarts as Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig--not to mention that bad banner on the ads reading "from the director of Superbad"--audiences who wouldn't know The Daytrippers from the Night Stalker might very well show up expecting Superbad II, a possible misunderstanding that the studio might have little interest in discouraging.

Writing in The New York Times, Larry Rohter notes that in Superbad, the director "telegraphed his intentions before even a single line of dialogue had been uttered. With a title taken from a James Brown song and a soundtrack that leaned heavily on funk hits from the 1970s, the contrast with the movie’s three main characters, suburban white boys as nerdy and insecure as they were randy, could hardly have been more pronounced." In Adventureland, "Once again he uses music to signal what is to come, but this time he kicks things off with the Replacements and the Velvet Underground." As Mottola explains, “I had to indicate to the audience this may not be what you are expecting." The new movie is autobiographical, its tone more bittersweet than brassy. Rauch writes that some of Mottola's "most enduring memories of that time stem from the exasperation he felt hearing the same songs played over and over on loudspeakers at the park, and the exhilaration he felt tuning in to college radio when he and his friends were off duty." This actually helped him to forge a useful bond with his music supervisor, Tracy McKnight, who also worked at an amusement park around the same time and can out of the experience with "Eddie Money embedded in my head." In the process of piecing together what McKnight calls "the soundtrack to our own life stories,” she had to obtain clearances for almost forty songs, and with comparatively limited resources: Superbad, for instance, used one Van Halen's "Panama", which, Mottola says, “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.”

Although the soundtrack did wind up featuring some '80s clurter as Poison, "Rock Me Amadeus", and some Rush (thanks to a character whose enthusiasm for the band may be seen as an accidental but timely homage to I Love You, Man), it does include such timeless alt-rock favorites as New York Dolls, Big Star, the Cure, and Husker Du, whose music plays a special role in the budding romance at the picture's center. (“It’s shorthand in the script,” says Mottola. “Kristen’s character is already interesting to Jesse, but he falls for her when she plays Hüsker Dü on the tape player in her car.” Just reading that, some of are relating so hard that our heads hurt.) The movie has an actual behind-the-scenes link to that world via its original score, which was produced by the band Yo La Tengo, whose members, led by co-founder Ira Kaplan, have a mutual admiration thing going on with Mottola. It's not Yo La Tengo's first time as film composers; their most recent record, They Shoot, we Score, consisted of music they originally wrote for the films Old Joy, Game 6, Junebug, and Shortbus, and last year they scored The Toe Tactic, which was directed by Emily Hubley, whose sister, Georgia, is in the band. (She's also married to Kaplan.) “I’m down on songs that literally describe the action on the screen, because that’s unimaginative,” Kaplan says, by way of explaining their approach to soundtrack work. Instead, “sometimes the music is ahead of the movie by a beat, or behind by a beat.”

Fantastic Fest Review: “Fanboys”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve mentioned this a time or twelve here, but unlike my colleague Andrew Osborne, I don’t have the Star Wars gene. Sure, I loved the movies as a kid – maybe not quite as much as the Planet of the Apes series or anything with Bigfoot in it – but they never became an inextricable part of my life essence and I definitely wasn’t waiting in some smelly tent for Episode I back in 1999. If we’re playing “Star Wars vs. Star Trek,” Kirk, Spock and the gang win out with me every time. So I wouldn’t appear to be part of the target audience for Fanboys, the long-awaited story of four geeks and a gal who take a road trip to Skywalker Ranch in order to be the first to see The Phantom Menace.

Having said that – and despite all the delays, reshoots and controversies over plot points that dogged the movie in recent months – Fanboys proves to be an enjoyable ride for the most part. If you’ve followed the behind-the-scenes machinations, you know the set-up: It is 1998, and lifelong Star Wars geek Linus (Chris Marquette) has terminal cancer. (This is the part the studio didn’t like, but after an outcry from fanboy nation, it is restored.) Along with fellow Force enthusiasts Hutch (Dan Fogler), Windows (Jay Baruchel) and estranged best friend Eric (Sam Huntington), Linus sets out in a van to accomplish the one thing he wants to do before he dies: see the long-awaited first prequel to the Star Wars trilogy. (As an aside, and without giving away whether or not he accomplishes his goal – imagine this is your dying wish and the movie in question turns out to be the freakin’ Phantom Menace. Ah well, at least it wasn’t The Clone Wars.) Road trip hijinx galore ensue, including a pit stop in Austin to pick up top secret intel on Lucas’s fortress from Ain’t It Cool News ubergeek Harry Knowles, a night in jail that will have you rethinking your whole approach to prison pooping, and a rumble at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas. There are cameos galore, including actors from the original trilogy, Seth Rogan in multiple roles and even the Shat himself, William Shatner.

Stylistically, Fanboys is sort of a mesh between the Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow sensibilities (Smith has a cameo and Apatow oversaw the reshoots and enlisted many of his regulars), but its secret weapon is co-screenwriter Ernest Cline, who has absorbed every ounce of nerdy minutiae from the past 30 years and deploys his vast store of useless knowledge for both punchlines and poignancy. Although Fogler still strikes me as a poor man’s Jack Black, the core cast is engaging, particularly Kristen Bell as the one girl who’ll put up with the geeks.

My main problem with Fanboys is that I wish it had actually been made ten years ago (as per Cline’s original plan), before geek culture became so pervasive and satisfied with itself. After another decade's worth of prequels, merchandising and ubiquitous references, I don't care if I never hear about Yoda, Chewie or Ewoks ever again. In a way, though, that's beside the point. Star Wars is the secret language of these characters – the way they always communicated. In that respect, it's no different than if the movie had been about, say, terminally ill Cubs fans taking a trip to see their team win their first World Series in 100 years – they'd just talk about Ernie Banks and “Let’s play two” instead of Darth Vader and “May the Force be with you.” The story is really about the friendship, the journey and the laughs along the way, and on that level it works even if you don't give a shit whether or not Greedo shot first.

Related:
Fanboys on the March
Fanboys vs. Darth Weinstein

Nobody Here but Us Chick Flicks

Phil Nugent — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There have always been "women's pictures"--or "chick flicks", to use the self-referential, lightly mocking phrase that Tom Hanks barks out in Sleepless in Seattle as he watches his own off-screen wife, Rita Wilson, tear up while relating the plot of An Affair to Remember. The ever-evolving problem of the chick flick--what Michael Cieply calls "a label that is increasingly viewed as a marketplace trap"--is how to court women without alienating potential male viewers, a big part of your audience if you're hoping to hit date-movie gold. (You also want to hit women in their soft emotional receptors without making them feel stupid about it. Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed SIS after some fifteen years as a journalistic essayist whose specialty was finding smart ways to negotiate her own relationship to the zeitgeist, was well suited by experience and temperament to pull this off. Incidentally, filmmakers pitching their work squarely at the male demographic don't have nearly as hard a time of it. Many men do appreciate it when someone like Tarantino finds a way to serve up shootouts draped with wisecracks in a way that makes us feel smart, but that doesn't mean that a lot of us won't still clomp off to see Rambo, and have no trouble going by themselves if no dates will humor them.) Now chick movies are being wrought from "chick lit" books, a relatively new development in publishing, or maybe just a standard development with a new name. This new wrinkle has yielded such hits as Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada, as well as duds such as last fall's non-starter The Nanny Diaries. That last one may have revealed something about the precarious nature of chick-flick chemistry. It starred Scarlett Johansson, who, I have reason to believe, doesn't have as many female fans as she does male admirers. And while a quick scan of the box-office returns on most of Johansson's starring vehicles begs the question of just what it is the guys would pay to see her do in a movie, I'm guessing that tucking in Paul Giamatti's kids isn't it.

Right now, two past masters of the chick flick are working on projects with roots in the genre: Ephron with Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep (as Julia Child) and Amy Adams, and Confessions of a Shopaholic, which is based on a book by Sophie Kinsella and is being directed by P. J. Hogan, the Australian filmmaker who made the Julia Roberts hit My Best Friend's Wedding. As Cieply observes, part of the fun of talking to the people whose beach houses are riding on the fate of these movies is watching them try to avoid being pigeonholed in the chick-flick ghetto. Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the producers working on Shopaholic, actually had the brass to liken it to "another Wedding Crashers," which, given the source material, is kind of like saying that, with enough slow-motion in the action scenes, the next Harry Potter film will be hard to tell apart from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. (As for the Julia Child movie, one of its [male] producers will only say, "We hope this will be a movie for everyone who likes eating.") In the end, writes Cieply, "Trying to pin down what, exactly, constitutes a supposed chick flick is more of a parlor game than a science. An Affair to Remember, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr played star-crossed lovers, clearly makes the cut. Knocked Up, in which Ms. Heigl and Seth Rogen played a star-crossed couple of another sort, probably does not."